TfL seals £15m deal to take its contactless payment system global

Transport for London (TfL) has signed a deal worth £15m with Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS), allowing them to adapt the capital’s contactless ticketing system worldwide.

The deal will see major cities around the world install TfL’s contactless ticketing system and the value of the deal is likely to mean the fares freeze Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, promised to deliver in the next four years.

This is the first part of a long-term strategy that will see TfL’s tech and expertise being sold nationwide and across the world.

CTS worked with TfL 13 years ago when they introduced the Oyster card in 2003 and later with the UK card industry to make TfL the first public transport provider in the world to accept contactless payment cards.

The contactless payment system was first launched on London’s buses in December 2012 and expanded to cover Tube and rail services in London in September 2014.

Since then, over 500 million journeys have been made by more than 12 million unique credit and debit cards from 90 different countries. Contactless cards have spread so rapidly they now account for a quarter of all pay-as-you go transactions on TfL network and according to Barclaycard and one in ten contactless transactions are actually made on TfL’s network.

Outside of London, CTS ticketing technology is used in cities such as Sydney, Brisbane, Vancouver and Chicago and they will be the first to benefit from the new TfL deal.

“Contactless payments have completely transformed the way people pay for travel in London and this deal will allow other world cities to benefit from the hard work we put into making the system work for our customers.”

I caught up with Guillaume Andre, Head of Marketing, Ingenico Northern Europe, to discuss the implications of a tech giant-payments provider collaboration-led future, and how Ingenico and Google might continue to innovate the POS system in the future.

The future is even closer than we think. The increasing pace of technological change means concepts formerly considered only abstract theories on a distant horizon are already nearly upon us. By Urs Gubser, Head E-Commerce, SIX Payment Services.